TalkCarswell.com

Another day. Another quango? I hope not

Thousands of foreign students have remained in Britain illegally because the UK Border Agency failed to act.

For years, the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee, has dismally failed to control inflation.

For a decade, the Financial Services Authority smothered City institutions with all kinds of compliance rules - but somehow forgot to ask the really basic questions that might have saved Northern Rock et al.

Everywhere you look we are governed by quangos - so much so that the public now has little say in deciding public policy.

Yet it is precisely because all these wretched quangos are "independent" that they are unaccountable. And because they do not have to answer meaningfully to anyone, they turn out to be inept and useless.

There's no one demanding to know why the UK Border Agency is apparently so administratively incompetent. No one is challenging all the lazy dogma about monetary stimulus at the Bank of England.

Government by quango does not work. It is a recipe for public policy disaster - and for Britain's slow, pathetic, terminal decline into mediocrity.

The idea that we should now create a press quango is not simply wrong because of the implications for press freedom. It is desperately sad because of what it tells us about our body politic. Is this the best that they can do?

I've not yet read the Leveson report, but I fear that it will call for yet another quango. Yet another state agency to do to the press what the FSA did to the banks. Or what the UK Border Agency has done for immigration control. Or what the Bank of England did to end boom and bust.

Surely we deserve to be governed by something bigger and better, and more animated, than this sort of washed up thinking?